


Winds At Rest

by surreallis



Category: Rookie Blue
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-12
Updated: 2012-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-29 10:29:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreallis/pseuds/surreallis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The awkwardness, the discomfort, the bond, the romance, the partnership, the attraction, and everything between them. The first meaningful shift back after the suspension. Post-season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winds At Rest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nereemac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nereemac/gifts).



The first week back, they don’t see each other at all. Frank has her on days, Sam on nights. She feels like it’s her first day again, with all the staring. All the whispering.

Gail gives her a blatant smirk in parade, and weirdly that makes things feel better. She’s not sure why except that if Gail had pitied her it would have been worse. The smirk just says: _Getting some on the side, McNally? Ha. Ha. I knew you two were screwing._

By the weekend, it’s getting back to normal again. Dov has stopped giving her longing looks, as if, in his crush on Swarek. he wants to ask completely inappropriate questions. (“He bites,” she wants to tell him. “And I liked it.”)

Chris stops finding reasons to hug her, and Gail’s smirkiness gives way to her usual annoyance.

Only Oliver hasn’t run out of steam yet. (“Hey, McNally, no funny stuff while we’re in this hotel interrogating this guy. I’m a married man, got it?”) She figures that’s a pretty reasonable price to pay. And considering how close Oliver is to Sam, it’s reassuring he can tease her about it...

The second week though, Frank puts her with Sam. Watching cells. Desk duty. Logging arrests and wrangling prisoners. On nights.

Now.

Sam leans back in his chair, plastic creaking, the sole of his boot braced on the desk, and he tilts his head back and stares at her. He's got that appraising look on his face. The one he used to use in parade all the time, back when she was a real rookie.

It makes her feel too young again.

"What?" she demands, because she hates it when he makes her feel this way.

He gives that overly-exaggerated shrug with that overly-bewildered expression he has, the one that says he couldn't _possibly_ know what the hell she's talking about, except that he clearly _does_.

She'd be aggravated, except, you know, they're only basically two weeks back from suspension and nearly two months out from sleeping together in a way that will never, ever leave her.

 _"Stay."_

"Okay."

With her hands messing up that perfect, yet chaotic, hair of his while he buries himself in her body so deeply that she couldn't take a breath without feeling him there.

"It's like we're in detention," he says, suddenly. His eyes haven’t left her.

"What?" It's strange the way they feel awkward with each other again. The sex is still there, between them, and the guilt and the... sheer _want_ of it all. But their TPA reps advised them not to see each other during the suspension.

Conduct Unbecoming...

 _Unbecoming._ It’s like a knife in her gut.

"You know," he says, that glint in his eye. "Like in school." He eyes her skeptically. "You were probably never in detention though, were you, McNally? Good girl all the way."

She snorts at that, feeling that weird, embarrassing wave of warmth spreading through her, heating her cheeks, that she always feels when he sees right through her. "I had detention!" she shoots back, maybe a little too quickly. She had it twice. Once for passing a note and once for... she can't even remember. But she hadn't been that disruptive in school. She got enough of that at home. School had been her stability...

Sam's eyebrows shoot up at that, and he gets that eager expression, and now she knows what's coming.

"Really..." he muses, and his eyes turn distinctly darker. They glitter with his interest.

And now she has to get out of it, because unless the note she passed was an 8-page manifesto about her secret life as a high school stripper, she's pretty sure he'll be unimpressed. "And I'm sure you were some leather-jacket-wearing bad boy who had all the girls drooling," she scoffs.

"Well, it worked on you, didn't it?" He gives her an intense stare that has her shifting in her seat and smiling despite herself. Damn it. She hates the way he’s so unflappable.

Sam smiles at her.

She looks away.

She hasn’t minded the cell duty, even though she knows it’s punishment. Keeping order and staring at each other across the room.

After two days, she could almost see Sam itching to get back out on the street. He fidgeted and shifted in his chair, talked incessantly, complained and then prank-called Oliver about 50 times.

She's trying to be serious and good, because this is it.

 _“I’m taking a chance here. Trusting you,"_ Frank had said.

And she knows this is a test, and they have to pass it or they can just walk away.

Sam knows too, but he's been here longer, knows his own worth. He has more to fall back on, and he's worked with Frank since the beginning.

Her first day back from suspension hadn’t been as bad as she'd feared.

She'd stood in Frank’s office before parade and they’d all had time to cool off. He'd told her he got it and he knew the job was hard and they all had to do what they had to do to keep sane. But there were rules and it was his job to enforce them _if_ he saw things ‘going on’.

She'd kind of frowned at him with that, because he’d stopped then and stared at her. And she'd known he was genuinely disappointed in both her and Sam. (And he can never punish her as much as she'd punished herself when she thought Sam was maybe dead.) But he'd seemed to be leaving her an open door, and it just made her feel more out in the wind rather than grounded.

“He meant you and Swarek can get it on all you want, but knock it off during super secret undercover ops’,” Tracy told her later. “And be smart about it. If he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t have to act.”

“I know what he meant,” she’d argued, a little crossly. Maybe she’s a bit embarrassed.

Whatever.

It’s not the first time she’s felt untethered and unsure, and it won’t be the last. It seems to be a rather prominent characteristic of the job, honestly.

She rips open a bag of Skittles she got from the vending machine before shift. It’s still three hours until their lunch break, and she always has a problem eating on night shift anyway. She just can’t get her internal clock to switch over quickly enough. By the time she’s used to nights, she’s back on days again.

“Hey,” Sam quips, suddenly jumping up. “Hold on.”

She lifts one brow and watches as he digs his phone out of his pocket and starts framing her in its camera lens. “What are you doing?” She frowns at him.

He gets close to her hand, holding the bag of Skittles. “Taking a picture and sending it to Oliver. Zoe has him off sugar for their vacation. It’s awesome!”

By ‘awesome’, she knows he means ‘hilarious’.

“Sam,” she says, sternly, like she’s chastising him. But then she tilts her head back and tips the package, so he can get a shot of the candy pouring into her mouth.

He sends it off to Oliver, who’s on his way to Disney World trapped in a minivan with his tolerant wife and three daughters. Off sugar and snacks.

When he looks up, he’s grinning at her, delighted, fiery, and it suddenly feels like it used to feel. Like they’re partners in crime. Like they’re in this together.

She smiles back.

He doesn’t look away, and she holds his gaze, and it makes her mouth run dry. Maybe makes his run dry too, because he licks his lips and half-sits on her desk and his fingers push her pens around absently.

“He’ll let us back out there soon,” he says, reassuring her, even though he’s the one who’s been crawling out of his skin.

“I know,” she says, although she doesn’t. She assumes, but that’s hardly knowing. There’s a part of her still worried that things will never be the same again. That she’s ruined everything now, like she’s always known she would...

When she glances at Sam, he’s staring at her, and part of him is suddenly very unguarded. “Hey,” he says, with a question hanging in his tone.

But right then, two coppers come in dragging a man in cuffs along with them, and there is suddenly a commotion. Sam goes to unlock the cell block security doors, and she walks toward the door, heading for the coffee pot in the next room.

She pours some over-cooked coffee into a white foam cup and then drowns it in sugar, stirring absently.

Through the door she can hear Sam’s ‘serious business’ voice as he talks to the two officers, although she can’t understand what he’s saying. The raspy undertone he has makes her swallow, hard.

What she had really wanted that night, when he had driven up beside her and asked her if she’d wanted to be ‘normal’ with him, was to ride home with him and crawl into bed with him and feel him breathing, but Frank had made it really fucking clear that if they couldn’t even stay away from each other during the suspension then they didn’t deserve a place on his force.

At 3 a.m. she’d been lying awake, her system too shot full of adrenalin and fear from the past few days to calm down and let her sleep.

When her phone had beeped, she’d had no energy to spare to worry about it. She’d answered and it had been Sam’s voice, low and aching.

“Hey. You awake?”

Her heart had pounded. “I am now.”

“Talk to me,” he’d said.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. What do _normal_ people talk about when they call each other?”

“Their day, I guess,” she’d said.

“Oh.” And he’d paused then, because their day had been a drug smuggler and fear and lots of water-boarding. “Pick something else.”

“Should we be doing this?” she’d asked. Despite it all, she still trusted him to know best.

“We’re two cops who got a reprimand, McNally. It’s not like we’re national news.”

“You love this job, Sam,” she’d said in way of protest. She did too.

“Talk to me,” he’d said again, and it was a warning this time, his voice going low enough to rasp a bit. “Or else I might drive over there right now. I can barely stop myself as it is.”

And she’d stopped, for just a moment, because all she’d wanted to do was say “Yes. Come over. Now.” And she isn’t at all sure how she’d resisted.

So she’d talked. Told him about her new lost condo, and how her dad was doing and how she and Leo had played a lot of basketball while she lived with Tracy, the boy laughing as she’d tugged him upwards to get him closer to the basket so he had a chance in hell of making the shot.

They hadn’t seen each other at all during the suspension, but she’d heard his voice. Nearly every night. Maybe every other.

Always late, when the city was mostly asleep.

“Talk to me. Before I end up at your door.”

So she had.

Working different shifts the first week back had put an end to the calls, and in the absence of any Sam at all, it had felt quiet.

Lacking.

In a dark and serious way that scared the shit out of her. Luke hadn’t felt that way. Weird. She’d never worried about Luke cheating, about Luke leaving, had trusted him implicitly, only to have him fall in the end.

With Sam she feared all of that stuff, only to realize in her head that the truth didn’t match the feelings.

It couldn’t ever be simple for her, could it?

She takes a sip of the super-sweet, slightly scorched coffee, and she both hears and feels Sam come up behind her. He hesitates, and she says, “I’m fine.”

He steps up next to her, turns sideways to lean a hand and a hip on the counter. He’s close enough that she can feel his belt buckle hit her holster, her shoulder brushes his chest. He lowers his voice. “This is just Frank’s way of testing us. It’ll be okay, McNally, I promise.”

She casts him an annoyed look, and he shrugs back in acquiescence. _Fine,_ his look says back. He rests a hand on her hip, lightly, before reaching to get an empty cup for himself, and she takes a step back to give him some room.

What’s bothering her, she realizes, is that she isn’t quite sure where she and Sam stand with each other. They both went along with the rules of the suspension, and now that it’s been lifted... what happens?

He hasn’t made a move, and she hasn’t either, and now it feels like... they’re somehow cut off from each other. And yet she can still feel the force of what happened between them. That bond is still one of the strongest things...

She isn’t even sure what she wants. Being together would be like one big, blatant walk of shame. Every officer knows what went on, why Sam was caught out and tortured.

And then there’s Luke...

And as much as she doesn’t want to consider him, she can’t ignore it. Can’t ignore that everyone else knows that as well.

Jesus...

The two officers come back out again, and she and Sam go back in to do their own paperwork and make sure the cells are quiet.

They don’t get a lunch break until nearly 8. It’s a Tuesday, but the way the jail fills up with Drunk And Disorderlies, it feels like a Saturday night.

There’s a small, quiet patio area behind the station building that’s normally filled with smokers and cops on cellphones during the day. But during night shift it’s eerily deserted. She takes her bag of vending machine pretzels and a Diet Coke out there, and Sam follows.

It’s warm for early spring, but the grass is still brown and hibernating, the trees still bare. There is a full moon that illuminates the darkness like blue candleglow. She smiles crookedly at that, thinking of the full jail and the weirdly busy shift of disorderly conduct and fights. The moon and the tides and the craziness of humans, Chris’s theory notwithstanding.

“No wonder,” she mutters, and Sam follows her gaze to the moon and smirks.

She finishes her snack quickly and then leans against a railing set into the cement, letting the warm breeze fill her face. It’s good just to get out of the detention area, where the scent of sweat and vomit and every other unfortunate body fluid never seems to dissipate.

Sam finishes his sandwich and then crumples the wrapper and sends it arcing toward a trash bin behind them. He leans on the railing next to her, close enough that she can feel the heat rolling off of him.

“Maybe Diaz has a point,” he says, and he sounds pained to admit it. “Moon tides and... brain electricity. Or whatever that shit was.”

She smiles in spite of herself.

There’s a siren in the distance and for a moment her ears hear nothing else. It’s a calling now, in a weird way. The wolf’s howl of another cop. It makes her head jerk up like she’s just heard her name. She wonders if that ever goes away, or if she’ll still react the same way, even when she’s old and almost senile.

If she even makes it to old age. Her record on that front isn’t stellar. Too many close calls.

Sam leans down and scrubs his hands over his face almost wearily, and he exhales slowly. She realizes then that he feels almost as uncomfortable as she does, and that it’s bothering him.

She just looks at him, and he finally turns to meet her gaze.

“Can we talk about this?” she suddenly blurts, because she’s never been that smooth.

For once he doesn’t play clueless. He gets quiet and ducks his head and she lets the moment stretch out between them.

“Okay,” he says, quietly. “Talk to me.”

And it’s so reminiscent, deliberately so, she knows, to all their late night phone calls. She struggles with how to start, and his calmness always makes her feel slightly spastic and immature. But they have a history, and it’s deep. It’s those late night phone calls, life and death, fear for each other, and skin sliding on skin.

“I don’t know what to... do, here. I don’t know... how we’re supposed to be,” she says.

He is still and quiet beside her, but she feels the weight of his full attention.

“What do you want to be?” he finally asks, and she can feel how carefully neutral he is trying to be in tone.

And it just makes her feel more lost. “Sam,” she protests, and there’s enough pain in her voice to make her wince. “Please do not make me do this alone.”

Somehow, strangely, although his actions have been blatant, focused and transparent, _she_ has been the one to risk herself, emotionally. Every single time.

He lets a long, slow breath out and the tension goes out of his body. She hears him swallow as he glances up at the full moon again. “I don’t know, Andy,” he says. And his voice is still so damn quiet. “You’ve got me so... tangled up inside. I don’t even know which way is up anymore.”

She doesn’t know how to react to that. It sounds ominous, and yet it’s an admission. “What does that _mean_?”

He lowers his head so he can pinch the bridge of his nose and then rub his face tiredly. “You want something stable. Something... solid. A man with a plan. And I’m not that guy.”

She stares at his hands on the railing, feeling weighted down. “I don’t know _what_ I want anymore.”

“The thing is,” he continues, softly. “You make me _want_ to be that guy. You make me want to make plans, and I just... don’t know what to do with that.”

She furrows her brow and looks at him. “Guns and Gangs?” He’d been on his way. Before.

He shrugs. “Not right now anyway. They don’t want a guy who sleeps with his partner and blows the whole operation.”

“Boyd blew it,” she argues. “If he’d repainted that stupid boat...”

“You know what I mean,” Sam says.

She does. Conduct Unbecoming is not a charge that gets you into the elite criminal task forces of the department.

“They’ll take me eventually,” he adds.

She feels shitty now, like she’s some kind of sabotaging harpy. Even though she knows he doesn’t think that. At all. That he blames himself for his own actions.

“So,” she says, quietly. “Until then?” _What’s normal for us?_

He shakes his head slowly, tries to grin with that uneasy smile he has. “What happens when I do go?” he asks. “When I go under for 3 or 4 months at a time? Are you gonna be able to take that?”

Her first instinct is to just say yes. Yes, she can take that. Of course she can, and they’ll burn that bridge when they get to it. But then she hesitates...

Because this job isn’t easy. And it wears. She has her moments...

Maybe she isn’t strong enough, or fast enough, or hard enough, or smart enough. Maybe she will get herself hurt, or worse, someone else. She has confidence, but she has doubts, and Sam has been integral to her identity as a police officer.

“I don’t know,” she finally says, truthfully.

He nods again, like he already knew.

“What happens if you stay?” she counters, because it isn’t as simple as staying or going. She doesn’t want to be like Luke, longing for someone who left long ago, settling for someone else. (And that still hurts a little bit. Maybe it always will.) And then self-destructing when that someone shows up again, toppling your careful and delicate house of cards. And then there is resentment. How will it go if he stays just for her?

He looks at her then, and even in the bright moonlight his eyes are dark. “I don’t know,” he says. His guard drops, showing her such a powerful longing in his gaze that it hits her low. Someplace deep that makes her feel weak in the knees. “But I know I don’t want to leave you,” he finishes.

She swallows then. Hard. Her throat is dry so it’s almost painful. She and Sam are never going to be easy, she realizes. She wonders if they’ll always have to fight for every little thing they have.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she says, after a moment. And he turns toward her, sliding his arm around her shoulders.

It’s quiet in the yard and they are alone, and he doesn’t kiss her but his arm tightens, bringing her in close until she’s nearly face-to-face with him. In the intimacy all she can see are the shadowed planes of his face. She can feel his heat and his breath and the steady rise and fall of his chest. He tilts his forehead down and his nose brushes hers, and it’s such a Sam thing that it makes her fingers curl into his waist, under his vest, where she can feel the muscle in his lower back and his hips.

It hits her deeper than a kiss would. It says _There are two of us now._ It makes her really want to put her mouth on his, and she feels how easy it would be to just give in.

She has to close her eyes and bite into her lip to back off. Frank isn’t around this time of night, and the shift supervisor usually works the desk. But it’s the principle of the thing. The duty. And she might not be purely a rookie anymore, but she’s not a proven vet either. She doesn’t want to think that the two of them together are a self-destructive thing.

“Look,” he says, quietly. “Plans change. You’re never completely sure you’re in the right place. You’re allowed to take some time and figure things out.”

“What if I never figure it out?”

He’s silent for a moment, and then he sighs, heavily. “Well... Then I guess you can just stick with me. We'll have a couple of kids and buy a house and do the same thing everybody else does. Seems to work for them. Most of the time.”

She isn’t completely sure that he’s joking, and she stares at him warily for a moment. Having a family and a house are things she’s always _thought_ she wanted, and yet... paradoxically, the moment a guy suggests it, she runs like the wind.

“Sam Swarek wants kids?” She snorts.

He shrugs. “Well, Sam Swarek doesn't _not_ want kids.”

She makes a face at him. “I really cannot imagine you with a kid,” she states. “Regardless of the baby-holding that one time in the park with Peck.”

He stands up and stretches a bit. “Well, it'd be a shame to let these genes go to waste, wouldn't it? I look far too amazing in a uniform.”

She laughs then, loudly, and shakes her head. “You dork.”

He smiles at her, faintly. The smile that says he’s pleased and still serious at the same time. He watches her laugh, and when she settles into an amused stillness, he leans over and kisses her.

She’s surprised at first, and then she leans into it, kissing him back.

“It’ll all work out, Andy,” he says, against her mouth.

“We haven’t even gone on a date yet,” she says, softly.

He lets go of her, but slowly. “I’ll make you pancakes,” he offers, trying for a teasing tone but he still sounds gruff. “This morning.”

She smiles at that, gives him a wry glance. “Maybe.”

But she knows it’s as good as a date. They haven’t touched since the night before Sam went missing, and thinking about going back to his place now, without the danger, sends a warmth flooding through her. It feels weirdly new again, and she’s not sure how they keep doing that. Getting close and then backing off until it feels like strangers again. Circling.

In a way it’s like her life with her dad. Moments of his addiction followed by scenes of clarity. Reconnection and confrontation. Over and over.

She tries not to look too deep. She’s not sure she really wants to know why Sam pings so hard inside of her.

Walking back into the division, they bump shoulders, and it feels natural to have him in her personal space again.

Inside, she detours to the bathroom while Sam goes to relieve Johnson, who was standing in for them during break time.

The locker room is dark and quiet, missing the constant bustle of the dayshift. She walks through the bullpen, and Frank’s office is dark. A few cops sit in isolated circles of light, filling out paperwork at desks.

Somewhere in the city, she knows Dov and Gail are riding together tonight. The rest of her friends are off. Traci and Jerry went to New York for the week. Oliver and his family are heading south to Florida. She assumes Chris is at home, feeling left out as Dov and Gail bicker in a squad car.

Back in the detention area, Johnson gives her a wink as he heads back for his paperwork out in the squad room. Sam rolls his eyes at her and opens the secured door to the cells to do a walk-through.

She falls into her desk chair and watches the monitors absently. She thinks about the end of the shift and Sam’s offer to make pancakes. So... they’re going to do this then? Try to be normal? Try to actually... date? Or something?

She hadn’t really thought of Sam as the type. It’s why, maybe, she’d run away from him in the beginning. Felt more comfortable with Luke at first. Because isn’t that what every normal person wants? A good looking husband, kids, and a completely normal courtship. Everything done in steps in the right order.

But Sam is nothing about order.

She uses her boot to rock her chair a bit.

 _”Normal is not the same for everybody, Andy.”_ Tracy had used her ‘sometimes I think you’re an idiot” voice for that conversation. Andy hadn’t been able to argue.

Her cell phone chimes, and she eases it out of her pocket. It’s a text from Gail: _”THIS NIGHT IS CRAZY. BE GLAD YOU’RE GROUNDED.”_

All caps. Slight dig at the end. It’s nice to know some things never change. There’s a photo attached too, and Andy downloads it.

It’s a picture of Dov putting cuffs on a hairy, naked guy who has paint all over his body and is baring his teeth at the camera.

“Jesus,” Andy mutters.

“What?” Sam steps back into the room, closing the door behind him. It clicks as it locks.

She shows him the photo, and he lifts one thick eyebrow at her. “Awww,” he says, grinning. “Epstein made a friend!”

She smirks at him and sends a text back to Gail. _”Full moon madness. Diaz ought to write a thesis.”_

There’s no reply.

She shoves the phone back into her pocket and watches as Sam fills out the patrol log and then stretches. He grins at her. “I’m thinking apple walnut for the pancakes. Just a touch of cinnamon. You in?”

She smirks. “All that starch will put us in a coma.”

He shrugs. “We’ll stop for coffee.”

Sam and his coffee...

She smiles faintly, still rocking her chair slowly with her boot. She watches him, and he watches back, his dark eyes glittering.

It might not be okay, and they both know that. There’s no guarantees. Ever. But he’s right about one thing: he does look pretty amazing in a uniform.

She takes a deep breath, and then gives him a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m in.”

~end~


End file.
